"Labour doesn’t need The Sun, we’ve got Twitter!"

So tweeted Labour Twitter Czar, Kerry McCarthy at 23.04 last night as news broke that The Sun’s support for the Labour Party was disappearing over the Brighton horizon – off to join ‘the boy Cameron’ after 12 years.

Is this true? Can Twitter replace The Sun for Labour? Well no. Twitter is just a channel, it’s content voters warm to and no matter how hard Labour might try to send out interesting tweets, they’re not going to prise 2 million Sun readers away from their favourite daily.

It’s true that Twitter has given some people a powerful new voice. One moment of tweeted irritation by Stephen Fry earlier this year, about HP printer software had their PRs on the phone to fix is within minutes of the tweet going out. “Use your power wisely young Skywalker” was Fry’s reaction.

Translating a portion of this type of fan power to influencing voters  is perhaps what McCarthy is hoping for but there’s no sign of any UK politician ‘doing an Obama’ via social media just yet.  Sarah Brown is the only really successful Labour tweeter but part of that success is due to her choice of content which is resolutely not party political.